Electric computer games, Beast Mastery hunting and obscure references

How do you make your character more powerful? Initially, the answer to that is by levelling. Each time your character gains a level, he or she becomes better at being an adventurer, hitting harder, taking more damage, healing better. You gain new skills and more talent points to spend.

Then you hit the level cap. There are no more skills to gain, no more talent points. You can play around with your talent spec a bit, but that’ll only get you so far. The only way to really improve yourself is by gearing up!

I have my eyes on three or four emblem items, but once I have those, I’ve run up against the progression wall. My guild’s not really that interested in hitting Ulduar right now, which means that unless I want to jump ship, there is an absolute upper limit to my progression.

This is one of the reasons why one of the new cataclysm features, the Paths of the Titans, is interesting to me. Essentially, you pick a Titan cult and follow their path, using the new Archaeology secondary profession to unearth artifacts. In addition to promising pets, cash and interesting rewards, it’ll open up ancient glyph slots. These are unrelated to inscription. At each rank you will have a choice of two or three glyphs, and there are a total of ten ranks and six paths!

The path of the titans will be available at maximum level only, and every character will be able to pick up archaeology without displacing any of their current professions. While some glyphs offer advantages such as more healing from first aid, some affect damage recieved (less bleed damage) or dealt (more damage following crits).

I like the idea of the Path as a concept, but also as a way to both customise and improve my character at max level. It’s independant of gear and apparently solo, so it’ll be something worthwhile to do when running things with the guild isn’t possible.